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iTunes 11.1 Adds iOS 7 Compatibility and iTunes Radio

Apple has released iTunes 11.1 with some major new features. Most importantly, this release offers compatibility with iOS 7, and you’ll need iTunes 11.1 to sync an iOS 7 device with your Mac (so don’t upgrade to iOS 7 right away if you’re unwilling to move to iTunes 11.1 as well). To get the update, which is a 215 MB download, you can use the App Store app or go directly to the iTunes download page.

However, the marquee feature is iTunes Radio, Apple’s new free streaming music service. To access it, select Radio near the top of the screen while in your music library. For in-depth coverage, see “FunBITS: Tune into iTunes Radio,” 18 September 2013.

Another major new feature is Genius Shuffle, which plays a series of random, yet related tracks. To try it out, choose Controls > Genius Shuffle, press Option-Space on the keyboard, or Option-click the Genius Shuffle button, located on the left side of the player controls where the Last Track button would normally be.

Good news for podcast fans: iTunes 11.1 finally syncs podcasts wirelessly over iCloud with Apple’s Podcasts app for iOS (which doesn’t appear to be updated for iOS 7 yet). However, in my testing, sync seems hit or miss. Also new is the My Stations feature, which lets you create smart playlists for your podcasts and sync them with the iOS app.

I went to download iOS 7 today, but my iTunes said it needed 11.05 (it was already that version which was a bit confusing). App store doesn't (yet) indicate iTunes 11.1 so I had to download it from the web site.

Not a biggie, but that might save someone from scratching their head for a while.

I follow several podcasts and have noted that iTunes 11.1 has a very unfortunate behavior. I like to use List view when listening to, and organizing podcasts on my MB Pro running 10.6.8 and now the list view includes all the podcasts that I have previously viewed and deleted followed by the iCloud download symbol. There seems to be no way to delete these listings. Some of my podcasts have many pages of previously viewed podcasts now. Does anyone have an idea how to alter this behavior? Note: iTunes Purchases in the cloud is unchecked in iTunes prefs.

After much fussing around trying to deleted those undownloaded podcasts, I noticed a new button at the bottom that sometimes says Subscribe and sometimes Unsubscribe. Click Subscribe and it'll reload a list of all back episodes, which is a nuisance. Select undownloaded files and click Unsubscribe and it will remove the undownloaded ones. Yeah!

Yes, it's stupid to remove a perfectly functional command (Delete for all unwanted episodes) and replace it with a pair of commands. Besides, the terms are all wrong. We subscribe and unsubscribe to a podcast itself not to add or remove episodes in that podcast.

I suspect those responsible for this change knew nothing about listening to podcasts and didn't ask. They had some abstract reason why this change was "better.'

This won't work for everyone as you still can't selectively delete individual podcasts as you could previously, but I noticed that on those podcasts which were showing old episodes as available from the cloud that Allow Auto Delete had turned off (I usually only keep the 5-10 most recent episodes of most of my podcasts). Turning Allow Auto Delete back on and hitting refresh caused the older unwanted podcasts to disappear from my list view.

The problem with this is that there are some old episodes of certain podcasts that I want to keep around (I could use Piezo I suppose to save the audio files, but this is a lot of work) and those will be gone. Also, I have noticed that the streaming option (iCloud symbol) is not consistent in that occasionally whole groups of podcasts suddenly are deleted.

My Podcasts view seems to order podcasts in a random fashion which changes frequently. Also some related podcasts (MacWorld podcast for example) are broken up into several different sections and end up spread randomly in the list. Fist shake to Apple.

Understood. I definitely agree that iTunes 11.1 has broken some basic Podcast functionality (again, grumble, grumble). Did you notice you can't access the settings for the individual podcasts from the list view any more either, only the default settings? Hopefully this will get fixed in an 11.1.1 update, but based on Apples recent history with iTunes and their Podcast app, I won't be holding my breath.

So far I've avoided moving to some of the third party podcast app's (which have been written about here at TidBITS) due to a combination of inertia and a desire to not add a third party app, but sometimes it feels like Apple is doing their best to push me that direction.

11.1 works well with iOS7 devices, but takes an eternity to sync with an iPod Touch with iOS 6.1.3, an iPhone 3g with iOS 4.2.1 and an iPhone 3GS with iOS 6.1.3.There is much spinning of the "beach ball". Not good and needs to be fixed quickly.Very impressed with iOS7 though

Looks like my almost 30 year association with Apple is approaching it's end. I can't stand the dumbed down current and upcoming versions of Mac OS; iOS is now heading down the same road with cartoonish icons, a bland pastel UI (no longer need a Retina screen); iTunes has been getting worse ever since the advent of iTunes 10 (though it seems to be striving for new lows with iTunes 11). So it looks like I'll have to seriously consider Android phones and tablets when it comes time to replace my iPhone 5 and iPad 3. As for Macs I'll just have to buy used pre-2012 models in the future. It seems that Apple has adopted Microsoft's hubris and stopped making things for "the rest of us".

The new 'sync podcasts across all devices' is an interesting feature but has a really nasty side effect. I have a Mac, an iPad and iPhone and have completely different podcasts on each (iPhone for commuting, iPad for travel, Mac for home) which all magically were 'sync'd' without warning so that all my devices looked like my iPhone! Once I discovered the setting in iTunes preferences to disable sync I understood the culprit. Like many on this thread I had many old podcasts that I'd saved that are no longer available that were deleted as the entire podcast and all episodes disappeared. Fortunately I have a Time Capsule and was able to go back and recover the old iTunes files but if not they'd all be gone. Apple really should have highlighted that on the install, or better yet, set the default to off so all behavior was as before until it's purposely enabled.

I'm also finding the Remote app to be much slower interacting with the new iTunes, much slower than the previous version.